In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

President Obama officially denies it, yet he confirmed Romney’s claim when he said, “what this board does is basically identifies best practices and says, let’s use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do.”

In this excerpt from his column in today’s The Washington Post, George F. Will quotes my coauthor Diane Cohen and me to show that IPAB is even worse than Romney claimed:

The Independent Payment Advisory Board perfectly illustrates liberalism’s itch to remove choices from individuals, and from their elected representatives, and to repose the power to choose in supposed experts liberated from democratic accountability.Beginning in 2014, IPAB would consist of 15 unelected technocrats whose recommendations for reducing Medicare costs must be enacted by Congress by Aug. 15 of each year. If Congress does not enact them, or other measures achieving the same level of cost containment, IPAB’s proposals automatically are transformed from recommendations into law. Without being approved by Congress. Without being signed by the president.

These facts refute Obama’s Denver assurance that IPAB “can’t make decisions about what treatments are given.” It can and will by controlling payments to doctors and hospitals. Hence the emptiness of Obamacare’s language that IPAB’s proposals “shall not include any recommendation to ration health care.”

By Obamacare’s terms, Congress can repeal IPAB only during a seven-month window in 2017, and then only by three-fifths majorities in both chambers. After that, the law precludes Congress from ever altering IPAB proposals.

Because IPAB effectively makes law, thereby traducing the separation of powers, and entrenches IPAB in a manner that derogates the powers of future Congresses, it has been well described by a Cato Institute study as “the most anti-constitutional measure ever to pass Congress.”

Magatte Wade, a Senegalese-American businesswoman in New York, writes in The Guardian:

Last Saturday I spoke at the Harvard Women in Business Conference, an annual event that I love…

Later, during a discussion on Going Global, a young woman asked, “For the Americans on the panel, how do you deal with being a person of privilege while working in global development?” My eyes lit up with fury as she directed her question specifically at the white Americans on the panel. I let them answer, then smiled and added with a wink: “I am an American, you know, and also a person of privilege.” She instantly understood what I meant.

Her question assumed that those of us in developing nations are to be pitied…

For many of those who “care” about Africans, we are objects through which they express their own “caring”.

To drive the point home, Wade posts this excellent video of “actor Djimon Hounsou perform[ing] a powerful rendition of Binyavanga Wainaina’s piece How Not to Write About Africa.”

(NB: The title of the original article appears to be “How to Write about Africa,” without the “Not.”)

It runs both ways. In Replacing ObamaCare, I discuss how “the act of expressing pity for uninsured Americans allows Rwandan elites to signal something about themselves (‘We are compassionate!’). ” Also:

My hunch is that this is an under-appreciated reason why some people support universal coverage: a government guarantee of health insurance coverage provides its supporters psychic benefits — even if it does not improve health or financial security, and maybe even if both health and financial security suffer.

Or as Charles Murray puts it: “The tax checks we write buy us, for relatively little money and no effort at all, a quieted conscience. The more we pay, the more certain we can be that we have done our part, and it is essential that we feel that way regardless of what we accomplish.”

I was traveling when the Washington Post published this article on D.C.’s efforts to implement ObamaCare:

If you want to know what health reform in action looks like, here’s what you should picture: a nondescript conference room, on the fourth floor of a government building, with about four dozen people sitting in rows of red chairs and one fluorescent light that keeps flickering on and off…

[T]his is actually a pretty important place. It’s where government officials decide what the Obama administration’s signature legislative achievement will look like for residents of the nation’s capitol…

It started with the first agenda item: Deciding what set of essential health benefits the District of Columbia will require all insurance carriers to cover. Even in one of the most Democratic-leaning districts in the country, there’s was not exactly enthusiasm for this new piece of federal regulation.

“This is mandated by the law,” District of Columbia insurance commissioner Bill White noted. “This is not something anyone here decided to do.”

Still, they did have to set an essential benefit package…

That sounds like to me like bureaucratic hell in action more than health care reform in action. And the last part, about ObamaCare or federal bureaucrats requiring D.C. to make these decisions, isn’t even true.

One consolation is that it looks like not even the 14 states that want to establish ObamaCare’s health insurance Exchanges will be able to do so on time.

Even with widespread support, the District still has a to-do list that stretches 11 PowerPoint slides long…

All of it is supposed to be done by Jan. 1, 2013, but officials here recognize, despite their commitment, it’s just not possible. Even the most stalwart of Obamacare supporters just simply have too much work to meet that deadline…

“No state is going to be able to be fully certified on Jan. 1,” said Bonnie Norton, D.C’s acting director of health reform.. “When they passed the ACA, they were highly optimistic about the timeline for states to implement exchanges.”

Does anyone really think that ObamaCare’s Exchanges will be up an running on time by October 1, 2013?

ObamaCare directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to define the “essential health benefits” that all consumers in the individual and small-group health insurance markets must purchase. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius kicked that decision to the states, giving them a deadline of this past Friday, September 30. Kaiser Health News reports that all of 16 states submitted an Essential Health Benefits (EHB) benchmark to HHS by the deadline.

But did Sebelius have the authority to kick this decision to states? In a September 26 letter to Sebelius, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine writes:

[T]he PPACA clearly states that the Secretary of HHS is to define the EHB package for policies offered both inside and outside of health insurance exchanges. While the language in PPACA was plain that this statutory responsibility fell on HHS, in December of last year HHS issued guidance preliminarily indicating states must select a benchmark design, with HHS potentially acting as final arbiter…of that selection. (Emphasis added.)

Is September 30 even a deadline?

Some communications from your agency indicate that this is a suggested response date while others indicate that it is a deadline of some sort. We again are asking for clarity.

Letting states make that decision will increase flexibility, though. Right?

[I]n reality the guidance placed additional restrictions on the EHB selection rather than flexibility. HHS guidance appears to render the states’ ability to innovate and to make an independent choice illusory. (Emphasis added.)

Indeed, the 16 states who have complied may be in for a rude awakening.

HHS indicated that any selection by the states will be subject to additional review, but we have no definitive guidance as to what, if any, weight will be given to a state’s selection. The minimum amount of information provided to date invites concern that your agency will alter or override a state’s submission…raising serious questions as to whether states have any meaningful ability to make a definitive selection of an EHB benchmark. (Emphasis added.)

Pennsylvania thus declined to submit one, and effectively told Sebelius to do her job.

Louisiana went a step further, threatening to hold Sebelius accountable if she doesn’t. In a September 27 letter, Louisiana’s Secretary of Health and Hospitals Bruce Greenstein and Insurance Commissioner James Donelson noted that the December 2011 “bulletin” merely stated that HHS “intend[s] to propose” a deadline of September 30 for making that decision—meaning that the bulletin “neither… has the force of law, nor commits federal regulators to any particular course of action.” Moreover:

[I]t is our State’s conclusion that while the bulletin states a decision is to be made by [September 30], this “deadline” has never been formalized through the official rulemaking process. As long as formal rules do not exist, the federal government can change its approach. Since the federal government is not bound by these bulletins, neither are the States. As such, the State of Louisiana is not legally required to submit a benchmark preference by [September 30,] 2012. The State of Louisiana will not permit the federal government to dictate to our residents a default benchmark plan, as the federal government, in its disregard of the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act regarding essential health benefits and other provisions of the PPACA, has no authority to do so under federal or Louisiana law until regulations are published in the Federal Register, following established notice and comment procedure.

The process developed for defining the essential health benefit benchmark has been a completely new method of establishing law without proper rulemaking. Implementation of new policies without open and public comment and publication in the Federal Register is in clear violation of the law.

The administration has charged states to build what the federal government mandates, but the federal government has provided [only] informal guidance and incomplete rules and regulations…Accordingly, there will be no essential health benefits package for the State of Louisiana, and we will pursue all avenues to prevent the federal government from selecting one on behalf of our state. (Emphasis added.)

As I have written previously, “implementing these parts of the law can only lead to more regulation, fewer choices, and higher costs. And of course, state officials will take the blame when ObamaCare starts increasing costs and denying care to people. There is simply no good reason for states to assume this impossible, harmful, and thankless task.”

The debate over President Barack Obama’s health-care law has taken another twist. Now conservatives and libertarians are defending it, while the administration tries to toss part of the legislation out.

The reason for this role reversal is that the drafters of the law outsmarted themselves and handed their opponents a weapon. Now they would like to pretend the law doesn’t say what it does.

Obama’s plan makes tax credits available to people who get health insurance from exchanges set up by state governments. If states don’t establish those exchanges, the federal government will do so for them. The federal exchanges, however, don’t come with tax credits: The law authorizes credits only for people who get insurance from state-established exchanges. And that creates some problems the administration didn’t foresee, and now hopes to wish away…

The administration’s response to the impending failure of its signature legislation – a failure resulting entirely from its flawed design – has been to ignore the inconvenient portion of the law. In May, the Internal Revenue Service decided it would issue tax credits to people who get insurance from exchanges established by the federal government. It has thus exposed firms and individuals to taxes and penalties without any legal authorization. Obviously, that situation sets the stage for lawsuits.

The plaintiffs will have a strong case. Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon – two libertarians, the first a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and the second a health-care analyst at the Cato Institute – have done more than anyone to bring attention to this issue. They point out that every health bill advanced by Senate Democrats clearly made tax credits conditional on [states implementing the law]. They have also uncovered that during the debate over the bill, Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, explicitly said the same thing.

Today’s New York Times features an opinion piece by J.D. Kleinke of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Kleinke’s thesis is that ObamaCare’s conservative opponents should stop complaining. “ObamaCare is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas.”

If one defines conservative ideas as those that emphasize free markets and personal responsibility, there is zero truth to this claim.

Free markets require freedom, like the freedom to control your own property, to enter markets, and to negotiate prices and other contractual terms. ObamaCare mandates how people must dispose of their property, imposes tremendous barriers to entry into markets, and imposes price controls and myriad other terms on ostensibly private contracts.

Market prices are the lifeblood of a market economy. Kleinke considers them a “flaw” that ObamaCare uses “market principles” to “correct.”

As I have written elsewhere, ObamaCare “promotes irresponsibility by allowing healthy people to wait until they get sick to buy coverage. It creates that free-rider problem, which has been known to make insurance markets collapse. Supporters of the law could have taken personal responsibility for this instability they introduced into the market—say, by volunteering to pay the free riders’ premiums. Instead, they imposed a mandate, which attempts to stabilize the market by depriving others of their money and freedom. Forcing others to bear the costs of your decisions is the opposite of personal responsibility.”

Employers are hardly “free to decide” under a law that penalizes them for not offering government-designed health benefits.

Kleinke is apparently unaware that half of the $2 trillion of new government spending in this “pro-market” law comes from a massive expansion of a tax-financed, government-run health insurance program that crowds out private markets – Medicaid.

I could go on.

Even if one adopts the more forgiving definition that conservative ideas are whatever ideas conservatives advocate, there still isn’t enough truth to sustain Kleinke’s point. Yes, the conservative Heritage Foundation trumpeted ObamaCare’s regulatory scheme from 1989 until around the time a Democratic president endorsed it. But as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru writes, accurately, “The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world.” Kleinke even flubs the paternity of the individual mandate, which he says is “an idea forged not by liberal social engineers at Brookings but conservative economists at the Heritage Foundation.” In fact, the idea originated with Randall Bovbjerg of the left-wing Urban Institute.

Kleinke has done insightful work. This oped is just nutty, and emblematic of the lack of intellectual rigor among the Church of Universal Coverage members residing in both left-wing and right-wing think tanks.

Why am I only hearing about President Obama’s gob-smacking “I haven’t raised taxes” claim today, and from Reason?

On CBS News’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, President Obama said, “Taxes are lower on families than they’ve been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven’t raised taxes.”

As of Monday morning, neither the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-awarding Fact-Checker, nor the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, nor the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact.com had risen to this opportunity…

Unbelievable. I just checked those websites, and they still haven’t.

Fortunately, Ira Stoll has. He leaves out a number of taxes President Obama has enacted, though, including raising the Medicare payroll tax on high-income earners, applying the Medicare payroll tax to non-payroll income for high-income earners, limiting the tax exclusion for flexible spending accounts, increasing the penalties on certain health savings account withdrawals, the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans…